Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins - Softcover

"Spencer's careful, detailed, well-reasoned survey and analysis of the historical evidence offer strong evidence that Muhammad and Islam itself were post facto creations of Arab conquerors. . . . [A] brave book." --FrontPage Magazine "Concerted detective work of a scholarly nature. [Spencer's] book is no polemic. It is a serious quest for facts."--Washington Times "A super detective service for the West . . . Spencer leaves few rocks unturned in his search for the truth about Islam and Muhammad." --Capitalism Magazine "A well-written, sober, and clear account." --National Review Online "This will send shockwaves through Islamic communities." --The Blaze "Impeccably researched . . . Thanks to this book, skepticism regarding what we can know about Muhammad must now and forever be taken seriously." --Ibn Warraq, editor of What the Koran Really Says "For too long, the topic of Islamic historiography has been confined to highly specialized academia. . . . An accessible primer on the subject as we have here is most welcome." --American Spectator

Did Muhammad exist? It is a question that few have thought - or dared - to ask. Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived and led in seventh-century Arabia. But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination, as Robert Spencer shows in his eye-opening new book. In his blockbuster best-seller The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer revealed the shocking contents of the earliest Islamic biographical material about the prophet of Islam. Now, in Did Muhammad Exist?, he uncovers that material's surprisingly shaky historical foundations. Spencer meticulously examines historical records, archaeological findings, and pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what we can know about Muhammad, the Qur'an, and the early days of Islam. The evidence he presents challenges the most fundamental assumptions about Islam's origins. Did Muhammad Exist? reveals: How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors - or the people they conquered - even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur'an, or Islam The startling evidence that the Qur'an was constructed from existing materials - including pre-Islamic Christian texts How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad's deeds were fabricated Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons Far from an anti-Islamic polemic, Did Muhammad Exist? is a sober but unflinching look at the origins of one of the world's major religions. While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has never received the same treatment on any significant scale. The real story of Muhammad and early Islam has long remained in the shadows. Robert Spencer brings it into the light at long last.